May 13, 2002

4:35 PM

I've been looking for a historical whois lookup: something that would allow you to see earlier versions of a whois record for a particular domain name. Well, Cool Whois isn't it, but...
posted by timeistight (8 comments total)

… it does create a cache of any record that you look up. I don't know whether this is anything that could stand up in court, but at least you could go back and check whether you let your domain name expire.

(Cool whois appears to timeout on domains registered to dotster, perhaps because it's European.)
posted by timeistight at 4:39 PM on May 13, 2002

(Dotster, that is.)
posted by timeistight at 4:50 PM on May 13, 2002

dotster's european...? i just phoned them last week at a vancouver washington number, and their whois info has a corresponding street location.

i've used google for cached netsol/versign pages to confirm when a domain was created...
posted by t r a c y at 5:20 PM on May 13, 2002

Could you show me an example, t r a c y?
posted by timeistight at 7:13 PM on May 13, 2002

i was going to give an example at the time of my last post but dinner arrived so i took off, sorry 8-) it's actually not so easy to do, rather hit and miss. if you use some of the original registrant's info (such as a phone number, name and or address) as search words it will sometimes bring up a netsol/verisign or internic page... then you can click on the cache link and hopefully get an original whois entry. i've been able to bring up old pages with my own various domains whois info that way but tonight i'm having no luck. however i'm also looking for alternate phone numbers that dotster recently removed from their current whois info and google found what i wanted with a less than fresh internic entry.
posted by t r a c y at 8:45 PM on May 13, 2002

According to coolwhois, my domain (slater.ch) is still available. Interesting...
posted by slater at 9:38 PM on May 13, 2002

How far back are you trying to go? About ten years ago, there was a printed copy of the WHOIS that was distributed to all regisrants. Y'know, back when in the days when the data was used to coordinate network operations and not spam the crap out of people. My version is boxed up. If you want to see one, I suspect there is somebody on the NANOG mailing list who can help.
posted by chipr at 10:47 PM on May 13, 2002

Right now, I'm trying to find the pre-transfer records of hoopla.com, smug.com and succaland.com, which are all domains recently lost by Metafilter members. Hoopla.com's record changed on April 5, 2002, so anything earlier than that would be good.

Other than that, I'm just wondering how I could prove ownership of my domains if, through fraud or incompetence, they were registered by someone else.
posted by timeistight at 8:54 AM on May 14, 2002